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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

New publication alert! After four years of analysis, synthesis, and careful writing, I am pleased to announce a brand-new article, “Desistance”: A Multimethod Review of the Literature on Gender Identity Variability in Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth (1) 🧵 psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

An image of the article "Desistance": A Multimethod Review of the Literature on Gender Identity Variability in Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 12/07/2026

So trans kids just "grow out of it"? Our work,highlighted here by Society Workshop, suggests that the previous claims about desistance that have been normalized for years are incredibly unreliable

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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

Jesspooka Kant 🎃 @jessdkant.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

There are actors within this ecosystem that transplanted fringe positions onto front pages, and then used the reaction to justify the article retroactively. It’s been the most successful avenue of attack, far and away above all others. The DW’s millions didn’t make a fraction of the dent this did.

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 24/04/2026

The end of the semester can't come soon enough. I love teaching, but I really can't wait to get back to having more time for research, writing, and science communication work

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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

John Sakaluk @johnsakaluk.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

The preprint is now available: osf.io/preprints/ps... Thanks to the PsyArXiv moderators for their speedy review! Freely available to any who want to read about the many ways in which the oft-cited literature on desistance spectacularly fails to support the claim of widespread desistance

osf.io

OSF

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Right!? There's just so much joy in it

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

There's something about a Japanese mascot ( @chiitan.love) liking my post that delights the hell out of me ありがとうございます！

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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

Q. McLamore @ghawinriver.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

I am so happy that this has finally seen the light of day. On the one hand, it seems an obvious answer to an obvious question, but it needed to be done. And I'm never gonna start harping on the bit about the Spice Girls. Ever.

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

We are looking forward to discussing our work, and hopefully moving the conversation about TGE care forward, without the constant presence of the errant claim of consistent evidence for widespread desistance. (END)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

An open-access preprint is available (osf.io/preprints/ps...). Analytic materials are posted on the OSF (osf.io/326ah). We noticed a pair of errors in Table 2 (in the PET-PEESE column) that we have submitted for correction (the reproducibly-coded table drew from the wrong models for those) (25)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Even if we did know about the desistance rate, it wouldn’t be practically relevant or even particularly informative about whether or not TGE care should be legal for youth or for any individual youth’s care (24)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Rather, we don’t have enough information to actually say how many transgender and gender diverse youth persist in their identity—whether one eyeballs the literature and blogs about it, or conducts a formal meta-analysis. The dataset is too small and inconsistent to yield informative guidance (23)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

However “desistance” is conceptualized, it should not form the basis of clinical or legal decision-making. This does not mean that people who stop identifying as transgender, or who detransition, do not exist! (22)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

The desistance rates generated from these studies are not functionally usable for informing policy or practice. From a quantitative perspective, the data are incoherent. From a contextual perspective, the underlying assumptions are indefensible (21)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

It doesn’t make sense to lump these studies as a sample that could inform an aggregate desistance rate. And even if you did, our quantitative analyses indicate that the meta-analytic range you would find would be ridiculously varied and uninformative (20)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

This pathologizing lens was so omnipresent that one study argued that liking the spice girls was evidence of “gender dysphoria”, and that the boy in question should be encouraged to “grow out of” (19)

From Singh's dissertation, a child makes the claim that it would be better to be a girl because they have better bands, such as the Spice Girls

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

We also have to look at the underlying assumptions that went into each study’s data collection. Out of the 11 studies commonly cited in favor of “desistance,” 7 collected data under the assumption that effeminacy in boys was a risk factor for “transsexualism,” and should be stopped (18)

An example of the pathologization of femininity from Zuger's work

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Labeling kids who were put into therapy for not being masculine or feminine enough without actual cross-gender identification as trans, while counting all participants who dropped out as “desisters” has a serious impact on the data (17)

A note from Singh's dissertation work (which was later turned into a 2021 paper) demonstrating that some youth did not explicitly endorse the desire to be the opposite sex

A quote from Steensma et al (2013) suggesting that not all youth explicitly expressed cross-gender identification

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Our contextual review found that many of the fundamental details needed to make any desistance estimate intelligible (i.e., “Who counts as a transgender child”; “What is assumed about missing data”) were inconsistent between studies. This likely contributed to ostensible desistance rates (16)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Coherent literatures don't behave this way. Literatures containing strong evidence contain relatively stable signal. Subgroups of studies may behave differently, but it shouldn’t be the case that *any* number goes or that small disagreements about inclusion/exclusion decisions change everything (15)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

We carried out different sensitivity analyses, which continued to show how fickle the desistance literature is: different assumptions about volunteer bias, publication bias, and/or inclusion/exclusion decisions change the results considerably (14)

GOSH plots of estimates and heterogeneity for studies included in the expanded set of studies

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

And does the original sample of studies support a “remarkably similar conclusion”? Absolutely not; there is a staggering amount of heterogeneity in these estimates, with desistance/persistence rates varying on average by 13% - 37% across studies (13)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

This literature is so small and imprecise that one can essentially pick whatever number they want and find it within a prediction interval; this is not what scientists expect from literatures with strong evidential signal. (12)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

We were astounded to find that meta-analytic prediction intervals from original sample of 11 articles supported ridiculously wide ranges of desistance (37% - 100%) and persistence (0% - 80%). The range for both expands to 0% - 100% (and beyond) when the new articles are included. (11)

Table 2 from the article demonstrates a wide range of possible desistance and persistence rates

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Our team also found newer articles, beyond the original 11, that provided proportions relevant to desistance. So we carried out our quantitative analyses on the original sample of 11 studies, and then again adding these five new studies to the original 11 (10)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

We analyzed four groups of proportions, consistently assuming missingness was either persistence (“last-observation-carried-forward”) or desistence (“noncompleter-equals-failure”); as a result, we had distinct desistance and persistence rates to analyze under each assumption (9)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

The late Dr. Scott Lilienfeld wrote about the problem of drop out/missing data, in his well-known paper on “Psychological Treatments that Cause Harm”, and how we can mislead ourselves if we base analyses only on those “completers” who were present at all times of assessment (8)

Psychological Treatments That Cause Harm, but Scott O. Lillenfield

Lillenfield notes that "psychotherapies that are harmful may yield high rates of premature client termination (drop-outs).

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Quantitatively, some have called for a meta-analysis of this literature; we did just that. Meta-analyzing proportions is not difficult, but making sense of these 11 was challenging because the studies make different assumptions about what became of someone who dropped out of the study (7)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

We used a combined quantitative and qualitative approach to critically evaluate the 11 studies that reached a “remarkably similar conclusion” about widespread desistance. Spoiler: these claims do not hold up (6)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

Importantly, we are not the first to question the numbers behind desistance claims. In trans circles, it’s called the “Desistance Myth.” Other scholars (esp. Temple-Newhook et al., 2018, Ashley, 2019; Serano; Winters) have questioned the relevance and accuracy of the data behind these claims (5)

The clinical irrelevance of "desistance" research for transgender and gender creative youth, written by Florence Ashley

A critical commentary on follow-up studies and "desistance" theories about transgender and gender-nonconforming children by Newhook et al.

The "80% Desistance" Dictum: Is it Science?, by Kelly Winters

Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation: A guide for Understanding Transgender Children Debates, by Julia Serano

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

My colleagues and I began by asking, “what is the quantitative evidence for the “widespread desistance” claim, how was evidence for this claim made, how much confidence should we have in it?, and do the studies in this literature truly support a ‘remarkably similar conclusion’?” (4)

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

The widespread desistance claim and 60-90% range is featured *everywhere*. It’s in bills banning gender-affirming care in the U.S., it’s in the Cass Review... it’s even in the DSM-5-TR! It’s a main pillar of arguments against medical transition (3)

A screenshot from the Cass review related to desistance

A screenshot from the DSM-5-TR discussing persistence rates

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

When trans kids are discussed, folks often claim that 60-90% stop being trans. Previously accepted as fact, this desistance rate was repopularized by a blogpost summarizing 11 studies which were described as reaching a “remarkably similar conclusion” despite their methodological differences. (2)

Screenshot of a post on the blog "Sexology Today!" that makes the claim that 60-90% of transgender youth stop identifying as transgender

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/04/2026

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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

Q. McLamore @ghawinriver.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

One thing I want to stress--beyond admiration and joy that this is being exposed and discussed at all--is that the work I, and others did, cited in here on how modern conversion practices are laundered and sanitized has been ongoing for decades at this point. As has its inexorable inroads into NHS.

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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

Society Workshop @societyworkshop.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Hello! We're interested in bringing social science to the public through community partnership, through public teaching, and through training. We are here to connect with all kinds of organizations and people interested in promoting a more engaged and knowledgeable public!

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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

Franki Kung @frankikung.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Are you interested in using science to improve policies and training? Supporting future generations of scholars? Helping to ensure critical knowledge production is not compromised by funding disruption and political interference? Check this out and consider supporting! www.societyworkshop.org

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 16/03/2026

Thank you, @mwkraus.bsky.social, for letting me do my small part to make this a reality. I cannot wait to see all that Society Workshop will accomplish

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 16/03/2026

The work of science can, and must, extend beyond the hallways and offices of university settings. I am so excited about the possibilities of Society Workshop to engage with scientists and community members alike to bridge the gap and to make real the work that we care so much about.

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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

Samantha Joel @datingdecisions.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Study promotion for a great PhD student! If you and/or your romantic partner are experiencing depressive symptoms, consider participating in this online study. Your participation can help researchers better understand romantic partner support. Open to couples of any gender or sexual orientation 🌈

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Reposted by Dr. Catherine Wall

Nina Wang @ninawang.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Interested in doing a postdoc on misinfo/belief change with me and @gordpennycook.bsky.social? We are looking for candidates to apply for a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellowship, based at York University. Contact me for more details! #PsychJobs

yorku.ca

Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellowships - Connected Minds

INTRODUCTION: New technologies are revolutionizing society, creating a 'techno-social collective' where humans and intelligent technologies are deeply interconnected. While such advances present excit...

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 18/12/2025

As the Light and Dark once again clash, we find ourselves participating in the Festival of Lightsabers. The Darkside holds that only in shevirat ha-kelim will we find true freedom, while the Lightside aims for tikkun

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 18/12/2025

How is it that there are no lightsaber hanukiahs out there? Like... Lightsaber hilts would make the best holders for candles

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 18/12/2025

The more I look at this image, the more cursed it becomes

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 18/12/2025

The "Make America Healthy Again" crowd is, once again, taking actions that harm Americans. Not only will this lead to higher rates of depression and suicidality for youth, it will impact those youth for the rest of their lives. Trans youth deserve care

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 14/12/2025

Yesterday, I had the honor of being the invited speaker at the VCU Department of Psychology's commencement ceremony. While I would love to share all of those words here, apparently character limits exist I encourage you to check out the brand new blog entry on my website:

catherinesjwall.com

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Dr. Catherine Wall @catherinesjwall.com · 02/12/2025

Every so often I relisten to the musical The Last Five Years just to remind myself how fucking awful Jaime is (and how wonderful Jeremy Jordan is)

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